October 27, 2011

A couple of weeks ago (I apologize for the delayed reaction) AOL Jobs featured a Claire Gordon's article about Victoria Liss, a waitress/bartender (the author called her both), who posted a copy of a customer's receipt on her Facebook page together with a photo of some guy who just happened to be the customer's double namesake. She's done this in retaliation for a zero-tip and a note the customer wrote at the bottom, which basically amounted to a personal attack on her appearance.

The article has generated over 3500 comments. If you scroll through them, you'll notice that most fall into two groups. Those written by people, whose income at some point in their lives depended on tipping generosity, express compassion and support for Ms. Liss's being hurt by the "horrible" treatment; many share their own experiences of customers' "unfairness." Others emanate the collective contempt towards the "obnoxious" expectations of tips by service industry professionals (especially in food and drink establishments), regardless of the quality of their work. Many state that tips are essentially performance bonuses - a valid point I strongly uphold.

What surprises and worries me is that only a handful of commentators address the most important issue of the story - the illegality and immorality of Ms. Liss's act of publicizing the receipt to the whole world. You see, it wasn't hers to use as she pleases. A credit card receipt is a financial and legal instrument that binds together at least four entities: a credit card holder (customer), a credit card acceptor (merchant, in this case the restaurant as a legal entity and its owners), a credit card issuer (bank), and a payment clearance party (merchant service provider). Do you see a waitress anywhere on this list? With respect to the receipt, the server has a fiduciary duty to her employer to pass it to accounting. That's it. She was not supposed to copy it, take it out of her place of employment, or use it any other way. Ms. Liss's actions violated the customer's personal rights to privacy and broke the fiduciary trust of her employer. In addition, all those financial parties to the transaction are bound by the federal law to protect the credit card holders' privacy. Ms. Liss exposed all of them to a possibility of civil legal actions and regulation censures.

Technically, every single party injured by Ms. Liss have rights to go after her: the customer, the poor innocent guy whose picture she posted, the employer, the merchant service provider, and the bank that issued the credit card. At the very least, she should be fired. And if I was in charge of Facebook's policy-making, I would close her account as well. This has nothing to do with the freedom of speech - this is aiding in an illegal activity.

Legal issues aside, what's up with the fact that she couldn't even remember the customer's face and got the wrong guy's picture? Why nobody questions that?

And I cannot help myself wondering about the other side of the story. What prompted the customer to be so extreme? Just your basic assholiness? I doubt that. Leaving no tip is one thing, but the text of the note may signify a reactive response to something that transpired beforehand. Ms. Liss admits herself that her suggestion of fats multiplied by carbs was not welcomed by the guests. What happened after that? Did she walk away, mattering snide remarks about anorexia and bulimia? You know, in that quite audible whisper, mastered so well by disgruntled service workers - the waitresses, the bartenders, the bank tellers, the park attendants, and so on, who hate their jobs and resent their customers. At one point or another we all have been exposed to their passive-aggressive harassment. Trust me, it can unbalance even the most stable of customers.

October 13, 2011

Marc Cenedella is upset! He is so upset he is lashing out at something Reid Hoffman said nearly a year ago at World Economic Forum in December 2010 (the Ladders' researchers must have been working on digging something up on him for months):

And I understand - LinkedIn went public and made X amount of millions in cash for Mr. Hoffman (I hope my readers understand that, like the rest of the public-stocks billionaires, he cannot really turn the $1.6 billion of his shares into liquid assets overnight). Mr. Cenedella, who started The Ladders barely two months after LinkedIn was launched in 2003, had wet dreams about being exactly in Mr. Hoffman's position by now.

I have no fucking clue why would he be dreaming those dreams. It's not that he created anything original. There were already other job boards with premium memberships and listing fees before The Ladders. The only differential he had was the $100K+ executive appeal (which, as you know, they just dropped - see my September 24th post). Did he think that those minute bells and whistles would be sufficient to build his value as an attractive investee?

You didn't really think that Marc was upset about your personal privacy, did you? Well, he did at some point - he was a man of ideals. When he started his company he did the right thing - he declared in the Terms & Conditions that he will not share, sell, etc. members' information. And indeed, I don't know anybody who gets spammed because of their usage of The Ladders. It's the other job boards that got their emails too: Monster, CareerBuilder, HotJobs, etc.

But big bucks are big bucks - they manage to bend out of shape the purest of idealists. And now, when Marc is alone in his office or his kitchen writing his blog, he is jealous, devastated, and desperate to kick himself in the nuts for not doing what all other amoral Internet moguls do, namely selling every single shred of your privacy in exchange for a golden bonanza Hoffman experienced on May 19th this year, when LinkedIn's IPO closed at the double of the entering price. (By the way, now it's at four times of the initial offer.)

So, he is upset and the post linked above is his way of letting the buildup of negativity out. Well, Mr. Cenedella's motivations aside, Hoffman's remarks in Davos are wrong on so many levels, it would take me several more posts to break it all down( don't worry, I am not going to). This is exactly what I would expect from someone who "made it" in the way Mr. Hoffman did, though. What's the implication here? Even if you are 18, but is concerned with your constitutional rights for privacy, you are "old" and square? And if you want to be perceived as young and hip, you should disregard all privacy concerns?

Statements like that don't upset me because they are "politically incorrect," as Marc Cenedella claims - I don't care about that shit! They upset me because they are politically dangerous and stupid. How intellectually limited one should be to mix up the teenagers' exhibitionism with privacy issues? Are you that confused? You don't see the difference between people, on their own accord, making decisions to disclose information about themselves and your selling their connectivity and interests profiles to third-party predators for an enormous gain? This proves once again that nowadays success, even in business, has nothing to do with intellect.

October 06, 2011

Speaking of Radiohead (I am referring to my last "Quote of the Week" post)...

No, let me first say that I LOVE Radiohead. They are one of my top 5.5 (it's complicated, ok?!) favorite bands. I have been to their shows, with pit tickets, standing for over seven hours in line to be in the first row, in front of the stage with big Ed's shoes in my face, watching Jonny Greenwood perform his musical voodoo, observing Thom Yorke drooling all over the mike, while articulating "I salivate like with myxomatosis," as if he was actually afflicted. I saw them perform "True Love Waits" for the first time ever. Good times!

And even though I usually religiously adhere to my own rule of separating the Artist from the Man (otherwise you end up hating everything - people, including geniuses, are nasty creatures), I agreeably pay attention to some of Radiohead members' personal principles: anti-music-establishment, free distribution, less flying, and stuff like that. At the same time, I am very objective. I don't idolize anybody. If something is stupid, I'll call it that, regardless of who did it. Plus, this is a CFO's blog, so when it comes to executive decisions I am especially vigilant.

Soooooo, the latest incident involving Roseland Ballroom (NYC) concerts really irritated me as a blatant display of a gross strategic mismanagement. Supposedly to make sure that real fans get them and not the scalpers, the release of tickets for September 28th and 29th concerts was held off until Monday, September 26th, 10 AM. And what was the wonderfully unique channel of distribution? The fucking Ticketmaster!!!

How out of touch with reality these people and their support staff are??? Don't they know that the days of conventional scalping are long gone? Today, you can be sitting somewhere in Nebraska with your little reloading software, buy tickets and immediately start electronically scalping them as PDF attachments.

I personally clicked "Find tickets" at 10:00 AM. The fucking Ticketmaster advised that my waiting time was 5 minutes. Nevertheless, in 3 minutes flat, I was informed that the tickets were not available anymore. 180 seconds - God bless the electronic age! Obediently I went to the "resale" (read - scalping) TicketsNow site (owned by the fucking Ticketmaster) - the tickets were already listed with prices ranging from $650-$1,500 for GA. The concerts turned out to be the exclusive events for people with money. Most of them cared more about the status of attending than about the music.

Talking about a complete failure of a business action plan! Is there anybody around Radiohead with a common sense to suggest a more intelligent strategy? You want to deliver yourself to your true friends? You are a super-group. Instead of going through Live Nation, you can rent your own venue and sell the tickets the old-fashion way: at the box office, with a limit of two tickets per person. Your real fans will sleep on the street through the night for a chance to see you! It's really not that complicated. But I guess, like with everything, it's too much to ask for a logical reasoning nowadays.

Essentially, a rock band is a small business - no different then, let's say an advertising agency. The set up is the same - there is a core creative staff and a bunch of supporting functions around it: administration, financial management, legal services, etc. My readers know how important small businesses are to me - I believe they need to be cultivated and nurtured as the only option for saving the world's economy. But, again, I am very sensible about it. It's not all businesses that need support - only the ones that are well organized and have smart leadership.

Hey you music fans, don't get mad at me (I'm on your side), but it's possible that most rock bands, after riding the initial fandom wave, eventually end up sucking because they don't know how to run their business well. There were only five really great songs on "In Rainbows" and this last album Radiohead finally squeezed out (I did say I was very objective) is really just so-so.

From time to time Mr. Yorke says that it "didn't jive in the studio," and I keep worrying that, after 26 years together, they will go out of business. I don't want that to happen, because I am sure many people, including me, would be happy to see them doing OK Computer, Kid A and Amnesiac stuff on stage for another 25 years, even if they don't write anything decent anymore. But they really need to figure out a sound business model to be able to do that. And, please guys, get some strategic management advice about that "tickets to real fans" program. I promise you, this will make already eternally grateful fans happy.

October 04, 2011

Observing Occupy Wall Street protesters right there by Zuccotti park, my cynic mind could not help itself to see social, rather than political event. Guys and gals hanging around, having a good time. Many analysts from all over the world have been trying to understand if these people have any agenda, if their protesting have some sort of intelligent purpose. And there is nothing... Just young people with nothing better to do being upset that they cannot become rich and famous overnight. Very few of them have attained above average complex of general knowledge and they know nothing about work ethics. In their poorly constructed bursts of words they bring up "disappearance of the middle class," but none of them understands that you are not born into middle class - you have to work for it, and maybe after 20 years of professional excellence you can claim your rightful place among its members. The paper wealth of Wall Street phenomenon is a perversion, no question about that. But securities balloons are not the only reasons middle class disappears in this country. None of the protesters want to work real jobs to earn their daily bread, or start small businesses that would keep them physically and mentally busy 24/7. Instead they want to magically transport themselves into the very places occupied by people with million-dollar bonuses they claim to despise.

And then there was that September 30th plot concocted by the protest organizers in order to get more people on location by announcing a Radiohead appearance?! People who supposedly oppose the concept of misleading, blatantly lied to the general public! What's up with that? There could only be three possible explanations why these protesters did not run away in shame after the falsification was exposed - they are either blind, stupid, or really have nothing else to do.

Meanwhile, the electronics were polluted with the false news of Radiohead's "spontaneous concert", and exchanges among some people I know have produced some wonderful pearls (I know a few very smart people). One of my funniest friends felt sorry for the "poor hippies crawling over each other's stomped bodies."

But the first prize definitely goes to the following quote:

"It's the perfect cherry on top of their worship of spectacle rather than substance."